The listbot at meetup.com, the commercial site whose clever software
facilitates face-to-face gatherings between Web surfers of like interest,
sent me a forlorn little e-mail the other day. "Congratulations
on a successful National Lieberman in 2004 Meetup last week! See photos
from every city," it read, giving a link. Click lieberman2004.meetup.com/photos
yourself, and you'll see the pathos: There ain't no photos.

That's not surprising. In Chicago, where I live, there wasn't any
meetup. Not enough supporters RSVP'ed to trigger the software's automated
threshold. Meetup.com, in fact, has registered only 332 Joseph Lieberman
fans in the entire United States of America, four in Chicago. An undercover
reporter from The Village Voice-uh, me-represents one quarter of the
total.

It could be considered comic, this abyss at the Lieberman grassroots.
It could be, that is, if Lieberman showed any signs of going away. Instead,
he's been ramping up: launching a splashy new tax plan; publishing a
dowloadable campaign book, Leading With Integrity: A Fresh Start for
America, and an accompanying website; kicking off a campaign tour-all
just this past week. And that's not funny. Because it's not too early
to predict that if the Democrats lose the presidential election next
November, Lieberman will be the one to blame. That will certainly be
so if he ends up becoming the nominee-in which case the Democratic Party
will be left without an activist base. ("I'll vote for Joe Lieberman
absentee from whatever country I move to if he wins the nomination,"
as one friend of mine puts it.) Perversely, it might even be worse for
the Democratic Party if he fails.

It works like this. He has already conceded Iowa, but let's suppose
Lieberman doesn't do too poorly in the other early states, picking up
some delegates here and there, perhaps even winning a primary, say one
of the five on February 3, the week after New Hampshire, when his name
recognition will help him because no one will have time to campaign
in all these states. Thus emboldened, he campaigns harder-by intensifying
his pattern of tearing down his opponents as dangerously liberal-and
remains committed to staying in for the duration. Then, as his star
fades, he'll have only one viable strategy left, a manic, all-or-nothing
strategy: trying to convince Democrats that the front-runner must be
dumped altogether, using the dark arts of opposition research, trying
to dig up something purportedly embarrassing from the front-runner's
past that the jubilant Republicans might even have missed if left to
their own devices.

Lieberman still loses the nomination. But the successful nominee ends
up, in a self- fulfilling prophecy, becoming just what the spoiler-candidate
said he was: unelectable-as a man named George Bush effortlessly exploits
the opposition research that a member of his own party has dug up. It
has happened exactly this way before. Just ask Joe Lieberman's old friend
Al Gore.

The year was 1987, an October much like this one, with a crowded Democratic
field usefully united on many, if not most, issues, but for a single
irritant: Al Gore, who, determined to distinguish himself from the field
by a supposedly sage and mature moderate conservatism, stepped up to
the microphone at the National Press Club and read his fellow Democratic
candidates clear out of the United States of America. "The politics
of retreat, complacency, and doubt may appeal to others," he said,
"but it will not do for me or for my country." He had already
bragged in a Des Moines debate about his support for the Reagan administration's
position on the B-1 bomber and the MX missile, even on chemical weapons,
accusing his opponents of being "against every weapons system that
is suggested"; at the next forum, he lectured his fellows on the
imperative of invading Grenada and supporting the Contras. For that,
some Democratic insiders were whispering, was just what it would take
to be electable.

And even though the message hardly took with voters-party conservatives
had scheduled a cluster of Southern primaries early in 1988 specifically
to favor a candidate like Gore, but the dead-fish Tennesseean still
got skunked on "Super Tuesday" by the most liberal candidate,
Jesse Jackson-Gore stuck around just long enough to run a vicious campaign
in the late-inning New York primary, in which he grilled front-runner
Michael Dukakis for his apparent support of "weekend passes for
convicted criminals."

In Washington, opposition researchers for the Republican front-runner,
George Herbert Walker Bush, were taking notes.

"I thought to myself, 'This is incredible,' " Bush staffer
Jim Pinkerton recalled of Gore's tarring the Massachusetts prisoner
furlough program as if it were the idea of Michael Dukakis, when in
actuality the program had been initiated by the Republican governor
who preceded him. "It totally fell into our lap." Dukakis
emerged from the convention that nominated him with a 17-point lead.
Then Gore's million-dollar lines, so self-consciously crafted to make
himself "electable," began finding their way into George H.W.
Bush's mouth. Bush was able to successfully paint Dukakis as a dangerous
radical. Al Gore had provided the palette-his smears having had nearly
a year to sink into the American psyche.

Think about that next time you're watching one of the Democratic debates
and hear Joe Lieberman say, as he did at one, that if Vermont's former
governor won the presidential election, "the Bush recession would
be followed by the Dean depression." Or say, as Lieberman did at
his own National Press Club policy address this year, that his opponents
disastrously "prefer the old, big-government solutions to our problems,"
even though "with record deficits, a stalled economy, and Social
Security in danger, we can't afford that."

For partisans of the Democratic Leadership Council, the rigidly anti-liberal
pressure group that Al Gore helped found and that his vice presidential
candidate, Joe Lieberman, chaired from 1995 to 2001, the moral of this
little parable of 1988 is apparent: The Democratic Party should have
saved itself the heartache and nominated Gore in the first place, just
as it should nominate Lieberman now. But that won't solve the problem,
either. The myth that tacking right makes a Democrat inherently more
successful in a general election is, put simply, built on a foundation
of quicksand.

DLC "chief executive officer" Al From dutifully unleashed
the Mother of All DLC Talking Points when I asked him recently for his
take on the historical meaning of next year's presidential elections.
"The issue of 2004 is whether we remember the lessons, and build
on the lessons, of the '90s, or we sort of go back," the lugubrious
Southerner told me from his Washington office, which features pictures
of himself not only with Bobby Kennedy but with Richard Nixon, and also
a scale model of a Patriot missile. Central to this lesson, of course,
was the presidential election of Bill Clinton in 1992, on what From
only later claimed was a straight DLC platform.

"In my view, the key to the Clinton campaign was the political
message that he delivered: 'I'm not the kind of Democrat you've been
voting against for 25 years.' You know: 'I'm for welfare reform. I'm
tough on crime. I'm going to grow the economy-the private economy.'
" Only with that message of retreat from liberalism, From asserts,
were the Democrats able to win back "categories of voters we haven't
been able to win."

From has been repeating this for over a decade now. He also says things
like, "Bill Clinton would not have been able to win the election
if he had not run as a New Democrat, addressing the problems of cultural
breakdown." But like most of what comes out of the DLC's lavishly
appointed suites on Pennsylvania Avenue S.E., it contains considerably
less than half a truth. Cultural breakdown? Any American who read a
newspaper in 1992 knew that Bill Clinton had sampled marijuana, had
violated the sanctity of his marriage vows, had dodged the draft. They
voted for him anyway. And anyone who heard him speak that year knew
he didn't just promise to grow the economy but also willingly admitted
to a desire to grow the government, in order to protect the vulnerable
whom society was failing: He promised $50 billion a year in new investments
in cities, and $50 billion a year in new money for education, and universal
health care-this during a period of record deficits, a stalled economy,
and Social Security in danger.

He also, of course, made unmistakable noises about his toughness on
crime and rhetorical flourishes about issues like school choice. But
it's wrong to say these DLC talking points won him the election. It
would also be off base to say that his "old, big-government solutions
to our problems" won it. Ask any election expert and they will
tell you a more uninspiring story: Bill Clinton, who received far, far
less than a majority of the votes in 1992, won because third-party candidate
Ross Perot took away so many that ordinarily would have gone to George
H.W. Bush. Who, let's not forget, had about the lowest approval rating
of any president seeking re-election in history. My little mutt Checkers
(with his brother Buster in the second spot) could have beaten George
Bush in 1992.

Beating George Bush in 2004 will likely take a tad more than that.
Every side seems to agree that the most important swing vote in 2004
will be economically squeezed white families in the heartland. They
live in communities that, more and more with each passing month, resemble
the Flint, Michigan, depicted in the films of Michael Moore. According
to the DLC strategy, the best way to win there is to make sure the Republicans
can't convince them the Democratic nominee is a dangerous radical. That's
why Joe Lieberman's fighting so hard to become that nominee. I've already
argued one reason that hurts the party-that in order to establish himself
as the most conservative candidate, Lieberman has to tear down the other
candidates in a way that can only play into Republican hands. It took
witnessing Joe Lieberman in the flesh, however, for me to realize another
reason the theories behind his candidacy are so bankrupt. It's not that
he's a stealth conservative. It is the many undeniable ways in which
he is unabashedly a liberal.

You wouldn't know it from his campaign strategy thus far-which hasn't
exactly been Harry Truman on the back of a whistle-stopping train. In
order to finally meet up with Lieberman supporters in Chicago, I had
to pay for the privilege. They, like me, had to pay to see the candidate.

When I first set out in early September to profile Lieberman, I began
the conventional way: I rang up the press office and asked when a good
time might be to witness the candidate in action on the campaign trail.
For weeks press secretary Jano Cabrera promised to get back to me and
never did. It was then that I finally logged on to the official Lieberman
website.

(It's at joe2004.com. Get it? Because he's just an average Joe.)

I took a look at the schedule of events the campaign seemed so disinclined
to have me know about. September 12 was coming up. On that day Howard
Dean stumped New Hampshire, snaking across the southwest corner of the
state for a series of free rallies, cookouts, and dessert socials; Richard
Gephardt gave a policy speech in Iowa. And Joseph Lieberman held a breakfast
fundraiser at the home of Florida real estate developer Mark Gilbert
in Boca Raton ("$1000 suggested"); then a luncheon at the
Governors Club of the Palm Beaches ("A business conductive environment,"
its advertising promises. "A place to make money and save time"),
also at $1,000 a spot. On September 13, he held only one event, dessert
in the tony D.C. suburb of Potomac. "Suggested contribution: $360
per person."

On the 14th, Joe scheduled an aberration, the only campaign event
open to the general, non-paying public all the way through to the end
of the month, a town hall meeting in Manchester (he preceded it with
what the campaign advertised as an "all-out campaign blitz":
The candidate knocked on six doors in downtown Concord). Then it was
back to the grind-a reception, the next night, at the Fairmont Copley
Plaza hotel in Boston. "Event Hosts: $2000 contribution per person.
Guests: $500 contribution per person."

This is what Jano Cabrera had been hiding from me. Save for these
fundraisers, his candidate wasn't campaigning at all.

I learned from the calendar that Average Joe would be in my city on
September 18: "Mary Castro and Angel Gomez/Proudly invite you to/'Dine
in the Sky'/With the Next President of the United States. . . . Sponsors:
$1000 per person. Guests: $250 per person."

Bingo. That my reporter's expense account could afford.

The most Republican-sounding thing at the fundraiser I attended came
during the cocktail chitchat beforehand. Joe was telling a funny story.
A lawyer friend of his was talking shop at some social event or another.
"Are you doing legal work?" Joe reported himself asking, to
which the man came back, "If I'm breathin', I'm billin'!"
A roar from the conversation circle surrounding him, appreciative nods,
then one of the guys responded, "That could be our firm's motto!"

Note well, however, that this was the only Republican-sounding thing
I heard from Joe Lieberman that afternoon. He opened with the story
of parents who told him of the rare disease their young child was dying
from, and how proud he was to be able to say that the first thing he
would do as president would be to rescind Bush's executive order limiting
stem-cell research. He would sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming,
join the International Criminal Court. He forcefully asserted there
was nothing to admire in George Bush's administration; and, despite
their differences on the details, Bush's economics sound just as dastardly
when critiqued in the soporific drone of Joseph Lieberman as they do
in the throatier cries of Howard Dean.

It kind of gave me a 007 thrill, stepping out of the cab to crash
the big fundraiser and hear Joe Lieberman talk like a stealth Republican
to his greedy fat-cat donors. The only buzz I left with, however, came
from the $250 glass of Chardonnay. Joseph Lieberman may be more conservative
than the other Democratic candidates, and he may be puppyishly eager-disastrously,
selfishly so-to advertise the fact. But let's face it: When it comes
right down to it, he is still a Democrat. His handsomely progressive
new tax plan shows that. Republicans will hate it. And the Republicans
had no compunctions about, and no difficulty in, derailing Bill Clinton's
presidency even as he tacked steadily to the right after the 1994 midterm
elections. They had no compunctions about, and no difficulty in, painting
the Georgia senator and Iraq war supporter Max Cleland as a treasonous
Saddam-supporter even though he lost several limbs in Vietnam. So why
should the Republican Party have any harder time smearing Joe Lieberman,
if he's the Democratic nominee, than they would Howard Dean?

Unless, that is, he adopts as his platform every jot and tittle of
Newt Gingrich's Contract With America. And perhaps even then.

Joseph Lieberman adds nothing to the Democrats' chances in 2004. He
does, however, take things away. In fighting to the finish and losing
the nomination, he will have irreparably weakened the winner. If he
wins it, he will suck out something precious: the active enthusiasm
of the unwealthy that is a center-left party's only natural advantage
against a party of money, the Republicans.

How many Democrats will be willing to work their hearts out for the
guy single-handedly responsible, in his kid-glove non-investigation
as chair of the Senate Investigations Subcommittee, for the Bush administration
emerging from the Enron scandal scot-free? How many, for the man whose
most enduring work in the Senate was preserving the favorite accounting
dodge, the non-expensing of stock options, of disgraced high-tech companies
like Enron and Worldcom?